Australia offline in an online world

As digital technologies reshape politics and international relations, Australia has failed to use online platforms to deepen and widen relations with Asia.

Australia exists in a world well and truly on its way to digital saturation. While we are likely decades away from the terrifying concept of ‘peak digital’, a complete renovation of how the public, organisations, governments and countries engage with and influence one another is occurring all around us.

Almost two-thirds of the world’s 7.4 billion people are unique mobile users. This is not a sim card figure; it’s total people using a mobile phone. Globally, one in three people are active social media users and 85% of these are accessing accounts from mobile phones. This shift to mobile-only Internet means it’s now mandatory for internationally facing organisations to take a mobile-first approach in their engagement.

The changes occurring in our neighbourhood are even starker. With 94% of the Asia-Pacific’s 4.1 billion citizens on a mobile phone, it is the most mobile-connected region in the world. East Asia is home to the highest penetration of social media users and also happens to house four of Australia’s top five trading partners. If we stich together the social media populations of North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa we still don’t arrive anywhere near Asia’s 1.2 billion social media users.

But the ways in which digital technologies are impacting the globe, and hence Australia’s place in it, is a more interesting and complex story than our proximity to billions of online users. The real story here is understanding how these online users are disrupting international relations and what that means for Australia.

Within hours of the recent Orlando terror shooting, ISIS members and sympathisers took to their digital medium of choice, encrypted chat app Telegram. Using the tool to encourage others to re-create the attacks, messages and memes were quickly shared and circulated. Among the targets suggested: July’s Toronto gay pride parade.

In 2014, high-school student Joshua Wong used Facebook to encourage Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement to download FireChat. Through wireless mesh network technology, the Firechat app can be used without a wifi connection or even a sim card. Usually used at music festivals, the app has been picked up by activists around the world who, for obvious reasons, want an offline communication tool. During the protests the app was downloaded over 460,000 times, resulting in 5.1 million chat sessions across one million new chat rooms.

FireChat was only one of many new tools that facilitated a change in the way activists could coordinate, strategise and fund their existence. Hong Kong’s protesters also maintained publicly accessible Google docs to coordinate supplies, used crowdsourcing sites to attract donations and build online hubs to store livestream footage and geo-coded maps. The protesters then became the inspiration behind the mobile app game Yellow Umbrella that allows players to experience what it’s been like to be a part of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement by defending key sites from police officers, triads, politicians and anti-Occupy protesters.

Unsurprisingly, Hong Kong’s activists also became the target of state-enabled and private hackers who, among other things, targeted the activists with spyware distributed via WhatsApp. The discussion boards the activists first used were quickly bombarded with disinformation.

Last year, in one of the largest cyber developments across the world, China deployed a new online warfare tool that, according to academics at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, represents a significant escalation in state-level information control. Called the Great Cannon, the tool is an offensive attack system that is linked to the Great Firewall, China’s domestic censorship tool. The Great Cannon allows the Chinese Government to hijack traffic from IP addresses and weaponise those addresses by re-directing the traffic towards websites the government wishes to attack. These resulting huge distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks were used last year to target anti-censorship sites run by Chinese expats.

This new capability attracted very little media attention or analysis in Australia. One exception was a Lowy Institute blog post by academic Sarah Logan. In Logan’s words ‘this capacity and willingness to conduct powerful attacks on sensitive material outside the Great Firewall demonstrates the extent of the Chinese Government’s ability to control political discourse outside its borders’.

It is vital that developments like this are discussed and understood. Unlike military capabilities, which take years and even decades to develop, cyber advancements – both defensive and offensive – can develop, be deployed, re-jigged, re-deployed and resonate around the world quickly and widely.

There is a growing appetite from state and non-state actors to both tighten the screws on cyber censorship while concurrently leveraging the Internet in new and unique ways. A recent 1.5 track dialogue in Moscow between China and Russia’s top Internet censors discussed strategies to further limit and control online information. Russian politicians and officials used the occasion to call for Chinese-style cyber censorship to counter Western influence. Meanwhile Russia is increasingly in the spotlight for its systematic propaganda and online disinformation push into Europe.

In Thailand, reporting continues to circulate alleging the military government is creating what the Thai media refers to as a “China-inspired” single gateway that will enable it to block access and control online information flows. Legislation recently passed by Thailand’s National Legislative Assembly give the government unprecedented executive powers, including over tech giants Facebook and Google.

The Indian Government is now one of the world’s most dynamic actors in this field, with Prime Minister Modi’s government taking a coordinated and proactive approach to promoting Indian soft power and engaging in public discourse. Simultaneously, the Indian Government leads the world in requests to remove content from Facebook.

This contrast is just one drop in a rapidly expanding ocean. Whether we like it or not digital technologies are disrupting and re-writing the rules which once governed how international engagement took place. And it is imperative Australia invests more in understanding this. Why? So we can counter unwelcome cyber developments while taking advantage of others.

In Asia, businesses, brands and media agencies are flocking to chatbots to engage mobile-savvy populations and tens of millions are signing up. Incredibly easy to program, chatbots give organisations a direct route to end users on themes of their choosing. New music from Katy Perry, NBA scores, CNN breaking news, pictures of IKEA products and analysis from The Economist – it arrives to users instantly and in multiple languages. Most importantly, the user is the curator. It’s not hard to imagine how Australia could benefit from this.

New tools like these give the governments an added avenue for international outreach and the perfect vehicle to expand diplomacy and influence opinion in Asia. Such tools could form an important part of how Australian products attempt to access markets, connect with customers and shape brands. Universities could better tap into key international markets and stay connected with former students as they progress through careers. Even niche technology news sites have signed up hundreds of thousands.

All these interactions from digital activism and diplomacy to cyber espionage, online censorship and customer app engagement fall under the increasingly expanding sphere of international relations. Whether we like it or not, and I know that many who work in this field don’t, technology has and is continuing to disrupt and re-write the rules of relations between international actors, state and non-state.

In Australia, we have not grasped that yet. Not at all. The Asia-Pacific region is there for the taking. More than a billion social media users live on Australia’s doorstop and we should be engaging them daily as they interact with friends, news, products, concepts, narratives and new ideas. These developments, many of which are happening in real-time, should be consuming immense resources within Australia’s international policy community. Advisers, trade officials, academics, politicians, intelligence officers, think-tankers, military personnel and diplomats should be given space to work on innovative ways to reach, engage, study and influence these users.

While methods differ between these international professions, the overarching objective is the same – to contribute to better understanding Australia’s place in the world. But how can we do that if as a country we haven’t yet grasped how the proliferation of Internet technologies has completely changed the rules of international engagement?

Few think tanks, universities, government departments or ministers have hired staff with expertise in digital politics or international cyber developments. That’s not to say many don’t dabble and dabble extremely well. But there are scarce positions dedicated solely to studying, reporting on and advising how the intersection between digital technologies and global relations is shaping the world. This needs to change.

But this lack of expertise is only the tip of the iceberg. There is scant public investment in research dedicated to understanding the digitalisation of global developments and what this means for Australia. Without such research to inform and underpin policy-making, Australia really is flying blind in international cyberspace.

There is also no coherent plan for how Australia should be engaging the world online. Australia’s next Prime Minister needs to ensure this lack of strategy ends now. The new government must invest in positioning Australia to take advantage of the information age. Given the range of actors and interests at stake such a strategy would need to be informed by a publicly consultative process. Crowdsourcing opinions and looking at what other countries are doing in this space will be incredibly beneficial. Such a strategy must be backed-up by expertise and quality research to stand any chance of making Australia, and our values, products and ideas, a competitive and attractive choice in the most fiercely contested domain in the world.

In order to pull Australia into the 21st century the government’s already-announced international cyber strategy offers an opportunity for the Prime Minister’s department to think longer-term and act big-picture. This strategy should go beyond the concepts of cyber security and official-to-official engagement. While very important, neither account for the fact that technologies have forever altered how Australia interacts with the world and the world interacts with us.

This international strategy should set out a funded plan for how Australia can better understand, shape and capitalise on being a part of the most digitally dynamic region in the world. This will facilitate Australia’s transformation from digital minnow to digital player in a world now online.

Danielle Cave is a PhD scholar at the ANU Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs. This is an edited abstract of a speech she delivered 16 June to an ANU symposium to mark the 10th anniversary of New Mandala.

2 Responses

This is a great article, and I wish this Ph.D. student well, in a very promising field where yes, the Turnbull goverment should give more punch to its’ promises. But is n’t there a touch of ? :
A) old fashioned Aussie cultural cringe (are we REALLY so far behind, in the areas she suggests?).
And :
B) digital Utopianism – eg. despite its’ tech-savvy, Hong Kong’s Umbrella protest was crushed. Political power still grows out of the barrel of a gun.
And Thai cyber-dissidents have largely failed (despite some successful disabling attempts) to bring down the junta’s cyber-regime, which was possible – but will be virtually impossible once that single gateway is established. NOT that I am ADVOCATING any of this. I am simply noting the developments – or, non-developments.

Hi Chris, thanks for your comment and I like your point about cultural cringe, very fair point. But first on your point on digital utopianism, I understand where you are coming from but I don’t believe the Hong Kong’s Umbrella protests were a non-development – just look at where the various student leaders who led that moment are now and the fact that the city had its first ever pro-independence rally this month. On Thailand, I didn’t raise the topic of cyber-dissents, instead briefly mentioned how the Thai Government was allegedly planning to manipulate and control the country’s Internet access.
Back to your cultural cringe point – I am confident with my argument that Australia’s foreign policy community (government and non-government) doesn’t invest enough resources in 1. understanding how digital technologies are shaking up international relations (in order to) 2. better manage and take advantage of these disruptions. Australia does not have an international cyber/digital strategy in place, it has never independently reviewed its global online activities (so the government’s digital outreach is good in some areas, terrible in others). Australian research institutes produce very little research on global cyber developments (via the ARC for example) and few universities/think-tanks have recruited experts in this space. When cyber is talked about in the community, discussions are almost always confined to cyber-security and the domestic cyber policies of states. As I said above – both of these are very important issues – but these are only a small slice of the (cyber) pie.

About the Author

Danielle Cave, based in Taipei, is a PhD scholar at the Department of Political and Social Change, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University (ANU).

Her PhD examines online and offline connections between activists in Taiwan and Hong Kong. She writes regularly for the Australian media and the Lowy Institute for International Policy blog, The Interpreter, including on digital Asia and digital diplomacy topics.